From First Things
By Allen C. Guelzo
“Justice and fairness” has become something of a mantra ever since presidential candidate Barack Obama told Joe the plumber that his hope was to “spread the wealth around” so that the economy is “good for everybody.” The plumber, Samuel Wurzelbacher, was less than thrilled by the implications of spreading the wealth, since his fear was that much of the wealth the president-to-be proposed to spread around was the plumber’s. But that has done nothing to give pause to President Obama’s determination to answer the “call to justice and fairness.” In his 2009 Lincoln’s Birthday speech in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, the president described justice and fairness—the “sense of shared sacrifice and responsibility for ourselves and one another”—as “the very definition of being American.”
Perhaps. But that was not Abraham Lincoln’s definition of justice or fairness or “being American.” And our current president’s failure to see that gives us an uneasy sense that Barack Obama has wrapped himself in some other man’s coat.
Lincoln certainly had more than a little to say about justice. After all, he was a lawyer by profession. “My way of living leads me to be about the courts of justice,” he joked in 1848, although what he saw happening there wasn’t always justice. “I have sometimes seen a good lawyer, struggling for his client’s neck, in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog, and cover up, with many words, some point arising in the case, which he dared not admit, and yet could not deny.” And in politics, which was his other great vocation, he had seen how often “the immutable principles of justice are to make way for party interests, and the bonds of social order are to be rent in twain, in order that a desperate faction may be sustained at the expense of the people.”
Read the rest of this entry >>
By Allen C. Guelzo
“Justice and fairness” has become something of a mantra ever since presidential candidate Barack Obama told Joe the plumber that his hope was to “spread the wealth around” so that the economy is “good for everybody.” The plumber, Samuel Wurzelbacher, was less than thrilled by the implications of spreading the wealth, since his fear was that much of the wealth the president-to-be proposed to spread around was the plumber’s. But that has done nothing to give pause to President Obama’s determination to answer the “call to justice and fairness.” In his 2009 Lincoln’s Birthday speech in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, the president described justice and fairness—the “sense of shared sacrifice and responsibility for ourselves and one another”—as “the very definition of being American.”
Perhaps. But that was not Abraham Lincoln’s definition of justice or fairness or “being American.” And our current president’s failure to see that gives us an uneasy sense that Barack Obama has wrapped himself in some other man’s coat.Lincoln certainly had more than a little to say about justice. After all, he was a lawyer by profession. “My way of living leads me to be about the courts of justice,” he joked in 1848, although what he saw happening there wasn’t always justice. “I have sometimes seen a good lawyer, struggling for his client’s neck, in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog, and cover up, with many words, some point arising in the case, which he dared not admit, and yet could not deny.” And in politics, which was his other great vocation, he had seen how often “the immutable principles of justice are to make way for party interests, and the bonds of social order are to be rent in twain, in order that a desperate faction may be sustained at the expense of the people.”
Read the rest of this entry >>
No comments:
Post a Comment